Any reasonable person, anyone playing with a full deck, would have got Bochetto’s point and probably dropped the story.
Not us. Maybe we were off our gourd, but we knew that Jeff had rented a house to Benny. I mean, Barbara had been at landlord-tenant court. We believed that Jeff had lied on some of the search warrants. They read alike, as if they were cookie-cutter form letters that Jeff filled in with different names and addresses, a kind of Mad Libs. And we weren’t the only ones who thought that the search warrants smelled. Veteran and smart attorneys like Stephen Patrizio, who had represented Raul Nieves and figured out Jeff had rented a house to Benny, thought so, too.
And no one—not even Bochetto, this hardscrabble bully with his commonsense argument—could convince us otherwise. This was why Bochetto was worried. He knew we were trouble. We lacked the skepticism and doubt that Bochetto had seen in other seasoned reporters. He sensed our enthusiasm, our energy. He could tell we were enjoying this fight, though he was convinced we’d lose.
He leaned forward, his arm extended over a Civil War–era sword—a gift from a client—that sat in the middle of his desk. He jabbed his index finger, first at me, then at Barbara. “I’m going to sue you—and you—personally!”
We stood up to leave. I whipped my scarf over my left shoulder and shook his hand. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said, rolling my eyes. My sarcasm elicited a little snort, almost a chuckle, from Bochetto.
We climbed into a cab and looked at each other, wide-eyed.
“Do you think he can sue us? Personally?” I said.
“Geez, I hope not. We’d lose our houses. Wendy, we’d be homeless,” Barbara said.
We began to giggle nervously.
“Nahhhhh!” I said.
Barbara and I did cede some ground to Bochetto. He had chastised us for not contacting officers and supervisors who could vouch for Jeff’s character. We realized he was right. Bochetto agreed to e-mail us names and numbers of Jeff’s colleagues, and we agreed to send him a list of our questions for Jeff.
Bochetto sent over the list of people he described as “more than willing and anxious to provide you with direct, firsthand knowledge of important facts relating to your article.” We hit the phones the minute we got the list. Richard Eberhart was the first name. Eberhart was Jeff’s former partner. He had retired a few years earlier and now, along with Jeff, owned J&R Dunk Tank Rentals, a company that rented moon bounces and carnival games for kiddie parties.
Barbara called Eberhart on his cell. Not surprisingly, Eberhart described Jeff as “an excellent police officer, a straight shooter, a hard worker, an all-around good guy.” She asked Eberhart if he thought Benny was credible and reliable. When Eberhart said, “Yes,” Barbara began to feel the endorphins of a reporter’s high, a blend of panic attack, sugar rush, too much caffeine, and great sex.
“Did you know that Jeff rented a house to Benny?” she asked, and threw in, as if a casual afterthought, “What did you think of that?”
“Would I have done that? Probably not. But who am I to judge?” Eberhart said. “I thought he was helping him out. It didn’t seem inappropriate at the time, but looking back, maybe it was.”
Barbara hung up and zoomed over to my desk, flapping her arms like a seal just before the zookeeper tosses a fish. “You’re never gonna believe this,” she said.
“Get the fuck out!”
We sent Bochetto our questions, fourteen in all, and to tweak him further, we gave him a deadline—highlighted in bold—of 5:00 p.m. the following day. He must have wanted to box our ears.
Bochetto didn’t answer a single question, but he gave us a colorful and snarky quote: “It is overwhelmingly clear that, when the hard facts are put on the table, your story falls apart and your questions become empty vessels of naïveté. What you have, and what you apparently want to rely upon, are nothing but a self-serving series of fictionalizations by professional liars, felons, and drug addicts, each of whom are looking to avoid more jail time by playing the Daily News for a patsy.”
Barbara and I labored over writing the story. We spent hours together in front of the computer, surrounded by documents, interview notes, and empty coffee cups. The floor underneath my desk was littered with Rice Krispies Treats wrappers. At ninety calories apiece, the marshmallow sponges were the only junk food that Barbara allowed herself to eat. I bit my fingernails and gnawed at the cuticles until they bled. I would have salted myself and chewed off my fingers—if I didn’t need them to type.
The story was a sprawling tale about how Jeff and Benny met, their rental arrangement, and Benny’s allegations that Jeff fabricated evidence to get into drug homes.
9
OUR IRASCIBLE CITY EDITOR, GAR JOSEPH, WAS HOLED UP IN HIS CLOSET-SIZE OFFICE FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE HOURS. WE WEREN’T SURE IF THAT WAS a good thing or bad; we just knew that he was in there reading a draft of our story. Actually, it was draft number four.
Gar had declared our first version “a fucking mess.” He wasn’t the type of editor to tiptoe around reporters’ fragile egos. He got impatient, sometimes unapologetically rude, with reporters who couldn’t pitch a story idea in one sentence or less.
“I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” he’d say. “Can you tell me again—in English.”
As city editor, Gar was the first stop for rough drafts, and often the last. “This story ain’t gonna run, unless you can figure out a way to make it unboring.” The sixty-year-old former City Hall reporter with a salt-and-pepper goatee had been around so long that he didn’t think anything was story-worthy. Here’s an e-mail he sent to editors assigned to work on Thanksgiving: “I don’t give a shit about the [Thanksgiving] parade unless a small child is entangled in the ropes of the Mighty Mouse balloon and choked to death, so don’t waste a reporter on it.”
Gar walked toward Barbara and me with his trademark limp, the result of running too many marathons.
“I think you’ve got something really good here,” he said, waving us into his office. A sticker that read “Easy Sucks” was taped to the glass panel beside the door. We sat on his ratty, gamy-smelling couch as he called up the story on his computer. His idea of a motivational poster hung on the wall: “Despair. It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”
“The story’s way, way, waaaaaay too long. This section here veers off a cliff,” Gar said.
Gar despised long stories. He believed the Bible could be boiled down to six words. “Old Testament: ‘God is great.’ New Testament: ‘God is love.’ Bam, done. Of course, you lose some of the metaphors,” Gar liked to say.
He also hated stories written in esoteric geek-speak.
“This part doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense,” Gar told us, as we stared at the blinking cursor on his computer screen. “It’s written in mumbo-jumbo police jargon that no reader’s gonna understand.
“Other than that, it’s pretty good. Fixable,” he sniffed.
After a two-hour-long journalistic colonoscopy on a cold, rainy Friday night, Gar leaned back in his swivel chair, adjusted his eyeglasses, folded his arms across his chest, and said, “Now let’s see what our lawyer has to say.”
We weren’t sure the story would ever run, or when the lawyer would read it.
Thinking we had done all we could do before the weekend, Barbara left work at about 6:30 p.m. to go on yet another blind date.
She’d been divorced for more than three years and was tired of being alone or stuck in relationships that she knew, deep down, weren’t quite right. She signed up for Match.com and spent hours crafting her profile. She began, “I’m the kind of woman who likes to pack a lot into each day so I can go to bed at night with a smile on my face, knowing I truly live.”
When she showed me her profile, I blurted, “Oh, Barbara, that’s soooo schmaltzy. You gotta change that.”
She looked crushed and later went home and rewrote the top. Not surprisingly, Barbara’s profile generated dozens of electronic “winks.” She quickly
realized that winkers fell into two camps: shy, insecure types who were interested but wanted her to return the wink before they wrote a note; or fishermen daters who cast a huge net and winked at hundreds of women to see who bit.
Some nights after work, we’d sit at Barbara’s desk and she’d pull up the latest dating prospects. We scanned their photos and bios. Some made us laugh, others made us cringe, and a few went in the “not bad” category. One with a username something like “sexyfunsmart77QX” looked neither sexy, fun, or smart. Another resembled a wild-eyed Charlie Manson who might stuff her body in a trunk. He wanted to meet for a drink. She visualized her blood in a glass. Two more were not much older than her twenty-two-year-old son, Josh. “We’d be great together, gorgeous,” one wrote. We knew where he wanted to be “great.” The last one had an anger-management problem: “The LEAST you could do is write back. Your loss!”
The guy she planned to meet on that Friday night sounded promising. He had told her that he was a fifty-four-year-old manager for a computer company, had two adult kids, and loved to run. She met him at a coffee shop.
This couldn’t be him, she thought, as she saw this man, mostly bald, with a few strands of gray hair swept to the right in a comb-over, walk toward her. With tense, slightly hunched shoulders and a slow gait, he looked close to Barbara’s dad’s age. Nothing like his Match photo. He said in his profile that he was six feet tall. Maybe thirty years ago, Barbara thought.
He stretched out his liver-spotted hand for her to shake, and they walked inside.
Within twenty minutes, he pulled out his wallet to show Barbara photos of his three grandkids. They were next to his AARP card. He told her he had retired from his job.
“So how old are you?” she asked curiously.
“Sixty-six,” he said.
“But your profile says you’re fifty-four.”
“I know. I figured most women your age would dismiss me if I put my real age. And all they have to do is meet me.”
“But that’s a big age difference. That’s like twelve years,” she said.
“You know what?” he said, leaning toward her, clearly irritated. “Most women your age have no problem with it. I have a five-bedroom house, a pool. I drive a Mercedes, have a boat. The last woman I dated was forty-eight.”
Barbara looked at her watch.
At about 7:30 p.m., I was just shutting down my computer when Gar came over to my desk and said that our attorney, Scott Baker, and Michael Days, the paper’s top editor, wanted to go over the story. Right now.
I thought about calling Barbara but didn’t want to interrupt her date. Loaded down with an armful of documents, I trailed Gar, beetle-like, into Michael’s glass-front office. Michael waved me in and I took a seat at the conference table. Scott had inked up a copy of our rough draft; he’d circled words and phrases that he deemed too loaded and scribbled notes and question marks in the margins. We went over the story, line by line. I slid documents—search warrants, interview notes, Bochetto correspondence, the rental agreement, and the landlord-tenant eviction notice—across the table for Scott’s review.
“Do you think we are going to get sued?” I asked.
“There’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Scott, who pointed to Benny’s criminal record. “The guy is a convicted drug dealer.”
“Yes, I know,” Michael said, “but these are two fine reporters. Ultimately, you have to trust your reporters.” He turned to me. “What does your gut tell you? Do you believe him?”
“I do,” I said.
“To me, it passes the smell test,” Michael said about Benny’s story.
Fear of a libel lawsuit, said Scott, is not a good enough reason to kill a story. “This is a newspaper. You’re a reporter. We’re in the business of writing stories.”
I felt the urge to hug this corporate lawyer, this unexpected ally and champion of journalism.
Barbara and I came into the office on Sunday to fact-check the story one more time. Barbara called Bochetto to let him know that the story was slated to run the next day. She asked if he had any additional comment. He had none. Gar gave the story a final read. Kevin Bevan, the editor in charge of the page-one design, who wore a down-on-the-farm plaid flannel shirt to work every day, showed us the headline he coined: “Tainted Justice?” The question mark was a hedge, the Daily News version of a wink, as if just askin’—“Hey, readers, do you think this cop is corrupt?”
“You can commit a lot of sins with a question mark,” Bevan once said, half joking. The Daily News was famous for slapping question marks on headlines. “Trish’s Killer?” on a story naming a homicide suspect. “Armed & Angry?” on a story about cops arresting NBA star Allen Iverson on gun and assault charges. “A Veteran Kidnapper?” “Devil in Blue?” “Highway Robbery?” It fit when we believed a criminal, politician, or public figure was guilty in the court of public opinion, but not yet charged.
The front-page mock-up that Kevin showed us featured a grainy silhouette of Benny, with a hoodie pulled tight around his face. The photograph, filmed against the backdrop of the paper’s dimly lit loading dock, had a sinister feel. The headline blared, “A Cop and an Informant Got Too Close and Bent the Rules. Now, the Informant Fears for His Life. Tainted Justice? Page 3.”
We believed Jeff was a dirty cop. No question. And every story we wrote after that first one carried the moniker “Tainted Justice.” Fact.
The next morning, we came to work prepared to take some heat for the story. We never expected the hair-singeing, ass-burning thermonuclear fireball that would soon unfold.
10
BARBARA AND I IMMEDIATELY LANDED ON THE FBI’S MOST DESPISED LIST.
“Our investigation is in the toilet,” a miffed FBI agent told me the day our story ran.
The feds were mad that we had convinced Benny to tell his story and then pointed him in their direction. “I realize that you guys have a job to do,” the agent conceded, adding that he wished Benny had gone to the FBI first and not the other way around.
In the days before our story ran, Benny sat down with the feds and they wired him up in hopes of snagging Jeff on tape. They wanted Jeff to admit that he had phonied up arrest paperwork and perjured himself in court. Benny told Barbara that the feds had given him a keychain, rigged with a miniature tape recorder. When Jeff arrived at landlord-tenant court, Benny confronted him in the hallway and tried to goad him into a confession. Jeff was leery; he gave up nothing, and we didn’t help matters. When Barbara approached Jeff after the eviction hearing, he knew Benny had sicced us on him. He wasn’t stupid.
The Internal Affairs Division was equally rankled. Police commissioner Charles Ramsey railed that we’d blown their cover, forcing investigators to abandon their undercover operation. Ramsey had no choice but to strip Jeff of his gun and police powers and put him on desk duty. Ramsey transferred Jeff to the Roundhouse—the hatbox-shaped police headquarters building, where Jeff spent all day taking fender-bender accident reports over the phone. Without the opportunity to use a wiretap, the probe would take months as investigators painstakingly dissected every job Jeff did with Benny.
As vexed as internal affairs was by us, they were even more furious at Benny for going over their heads.
When Benny went to the feds before giving the police department time to investigate, he might as well have flipped all of internal affairs the bird. But that was Benny. He worked all the angles until he got what he wanted, or in his mind, what he needed. His alliances were on spin cycle.
When Jeff told him that he had to get out of his house, Benny went to internal affairs. When internal affairs didn’t whisk him into witness protection, he went to Wellington Stubbs at the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission. When Barbara and I told him that we couldn’t write his story without using his name, he went to Fox 29. When the FBI asked him why he went to the Daily News, he rolled Wellington under the bus.
“I only did what Wellington told me to do,” Benny shrugged, as if he had no clue that the FBI a
nd internal affairs wouldn’t be happy with Wellington. When the city’s deputy mayor learned that Benny got my name from Wellington, he scolded Wellington for exercising poor judgment. The city later forced Wellington to resign. Wellington believed the city fired him in retaliation for sending Benny my way, but the city claimed Wellington had violated a rule requiring city employees to live within Philadelphia.
Benny was good at playing victim. Once, after FBI or internal affairs investigators picked him up in a car without tinted windows, Benny bitched to us that they didn’t give a shit about his safety.
“Jeff might have been an asshole with me and jammed me up, but he always picked me up in a tinted car. He was protecting me,” Benny complained to me.
When the FBI wouldn’t help him out with money or housing, Benny claimed they were punishing him for talking to us. The guilt ate at us because we cared about Benny and his family. His kids were close in age to mine, and I agonized that the story had put them at more risk. For me, telling Benny’s story came at a price—I would forever feel responsible for his safety, despite all his faults. I often found myself caring about people I wrote about, but usually they were sympathetic characters. Benny was not.
It didn’t bother me and Barbara when FBI and police heaped blame on us. They had their job; we had ours. Our job was to shine a white-hot light on wrongdoing.
In the early 1980s, there was the One Squad scandal—a small circle of narcotics officers were convicted of selling drugs they stole from dealers. Then, in the late 1980s, came the Five Squad Scandal—four officers in an elite narcotics squad went to prison on federal racketeering charges for taking bribes from drug dealers. In the 1990s, there was the Thirty-Ninth District scandal—a half dozen narcotics cops pleaded guilty to framing and beating suspects, lying under oath, and robbing drug dealers. The Thirty-Ninth District scandal was an iceberg that ripped open the hull of the criminal justice system and sank the public’s trust in narcotics cops. Hundreds of cases got tossed or overturned, and the city paid millions of dollars to settle federal civil rights lawsuits filed by people wrongly arrested and jailed.
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